


six types of love

by hongmunmu



Series: Life, Death, Time, Earth [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 07:08:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2642732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hongmunmu/pseuds/hongmunmu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He fell in love six times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	six types of love

The first was not his own.   
A love of happiness, of security. It was the first time he knew this love, and would also be the last. At the time, he could not comprehend what he had; indeed, some may argue it was taken from him before he was old enough to remember. But even so.  
In the beginning, he was an newborn who couldn’t walk or talk or understand love.  
He learned fast. He grew. He became an infant, and then a boy.   
He started school at five, and finished at six.  
But there were things he still did not fully comprehend.  
Things he would only comprehend a year or so later. When he was reduced to an infant once more, during the dead of night. In the centre of his house, clutching tightly to his father’s hand, as the man bled out from a stab wound on the floor in his nightclothes.   
And Orochimaru stayed that infant until two months later.   
In the hospital, clutching tightly to his mother’s hand, sat on the edge of the bed next to her crippled legs as she lay slowly dying.  
This was where his first love ended.

His second love was not long after the first.  
A white-haired boy who took him in after the death of his parents. Who laughed at his pallor and strange eyes, and hugged him at night when he cried for what he’d lost.   
Jiraiya’s daytime laughter was louder than Orochimaru’s midnight sobs.   
It was here that Orochimaru’s fear of being loved and loving in return was extinguished.  
Supported by a teacher and a sister and a friend.   
Inevitably life couldn’t be perfect forever but in the years that they had as children, they could love and be loved back without fear of duty or loss.

And as time passed it was then that his third love began to rival his second.

Orochimaru allowed himself to love the war.  
Much of the village agreed that it seemed he was born for the battlefield. He killed indiscriminately and without hesitation where his teammates would falter and make exceptions. It was cathartic, he realised.

Orochimaru knew for a long while that he had issues when it came to empathy. He had never truly felt for anyone else’s plight.  
The death of his parents was not about what they suffered but about what he lost.

On the muddy fields there were no morality rules. Either he killed or he lost more. Lost what he had worked so hard to create. So he killed. And he killed.

And he killed.

It was in the nights that he returned to the barracks, face half-white, half-red, his fingertips all but frozen around the bloodied kunai in his hand, that he could still see others worried about him, or felt about him. The war had desensitised Orochimaru to what others thought of the lengths he went to; to him it was all the same as long as he kept the important ones alive, and that was all that mattered.

They reminded him they were his anchors.  
But in the process it seemed they may have forgot.

Orochimaru killed and killed but somehow he still lost them.

Nawaki, his first student, his best friend’s brother; a mere child, blown into an unrecognisable mess. There was hardly time to mourn. War was no place for children.

Jiraiya, fickle as he was, decided on a whim to disappear completely. Powerless to stop him, Tsunade and Orochimaru watched as he deserted them, no way of knowing if he was alive, when he was back, where he was. Jiraiya had told them it was a matter of responsibility, of fate, but Orochimaru knew, and Tsunade knew, Jiraiya did not enjoy being a soldier. Surprisingly, Orochimaru found he wasn’t angry at him.  
And about half a year later, Dan, someone who Orochimaru had started to count on, a trustworthy ally, possibly even a friend - lost to the ground. Tsunade turned heel and fled as if in response.

Orochimaru took out his frustration on the battlefield, his anchors gone, his buffers gone.

He killed. His blade became an extension of his arm.

Hiruzen didn’t see him often; Hiruzen was nowhere to be found, either on the battlefield or locked in meetings with higher-ups that Orochimaru did not qualify to see despite being the village’s best weapon.  
So he ran for Hokage.  
Hiruzen pretended to be pleased at first, but they both knew Orochimaru didn’t have the mental capacity to run a village when he had barely learned to love.

If he had learned at all.

The war ended, as did his third love.

The fourth came shortly after, as if a distraction from his solitude, from the sting of being abandoned by the five people he trusted in some way, shape or form.

Danzo came, offering means, an enabler. He had the keys to a gate Orochimaru had been subconsciously trying to open for a long time, a gate Tsunade, Jiraiya and Dan had been holding him away from.

Orochimaru fell in love with ambition.

And so soon he knew the human anatomy better than he knew himself.   
He fell in love with the scalpel in his hand, with the endless piles of books scattered across the floor and desk, with the corpse on the table.   
He couldn’t be stopped; Danzo had started something he didn’t know how to finish.

Orochimaru’s ambition ate Konoha whole, and spat out the bones when it was done.

He left it behind him.

The fifth love came in the autumn.   
Shortly after he joined the Akatsuki – he met a person with hair the colour of maple leaves, & a thousand eyes, & a tongue sharper than his own.  
Orochimaru didn’t respect Sasori, exactly. It was something more complex than that; a kinship. A bond. Though their ideas were different, they had the same goal, and for that they managed to tolerate eachother, the two isolated things.

In the wind & the rain, they ravaged, they killed, side by side. In dark rooms they brewed poisons with their hands –  
And with their tongues.

No, Orochimaru never truly saw Sasori as an equal simply because he wasn’t one. Orochimaru was superior. He was stronger. He knew more. He’d seen more. Much more.

This wasn’t something he asserted, however. He let Sasori believe what he wanted, let him think he had won at one of Orochimaru’s little mind games, let him think he had power over the Sannin.  
Orochimaru knew better.

He bade his time & waited, waited until a dark stormy night. Waited until one of his hands had been severed by a certain red-eyed man; waited until Sasori was ready to kill him before he let him leave.  
Orochimaru left Sasori kneeling in the mud, & abandoned his fifth love there. He knew it had only ended for him. He knew Sasori would come, with hatred and killing intent in his wooden heart. Like a festering wound.

Like rotting maple leaves.

He would deal with it when the time came.

But for then, he walked away, rain on his back, and continued on.  
To something else.  
To a new land.

A land of rice fields, where cicadas would sing louder each hour in the paddies. Where golden gingko forests would hoard mists as if their leafy fingers had reached into the skies and pulled a cloud down to rest on the cold earth.

& Otogakure would be the place he laid his love to die, among the watery hydrangeas.

Until many years later, he found himself bedridden, something unrecognisable, uncapable, dying, dead. In the end, he was an monster who couldn’t walk or talk or understand love.

**Author's Note:**

> i was going to include sasuke and kabuto in this as well - they play a very big role in orochimaru's relations with others after all - but i felt that otogakure was a good place to leave off, so i suppose they are both included in that.


End file.
